If I were speaking to you face to face, I would now put on a very serious look and speak very slowly.
The next five years will see more innovation and invention than the past 12. That covers the entire life of Google, as well as the invention of Facebook, Twitter, etc., on the web, and the explosion of mobile telephony, the iPod, mobile software as services, etc., in telecommunications. We will see an extra zero on the number of products using nanotechnology, RayBan (or equivalent) head mounted devices that give full computer screen capabilities, an explosion in E-books, and much, much more. Your mobile in 5 years will be more powerful than the latest desktop PC is today.
But the next five years will probably not see a silver bullet cure for cancer, Alzheimer's or heart disease. Nor will genetics provide a detailed future history of your medical outcomes.
Robotics will advance into your home, if not your office.
A child born in the next five years in the developed world will probably have a zero percent chance of ever being lost in his or her lifetime. He or she will at some point not be convinced that's a good thing.
This analysis is based on simple extrapolation of patent filings, and should be (still) considered conservative. The wild and crazy stuff is for another post.
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